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RackN is attending next week’s Container World in Santa Clara, CA and looks forward to talking not just Containers, but image-based provisioning, immutable infrastructure, DevOps, and other topics. Rob Hirschfeld and Shane Gibson are attending and speaking on Wednesday in two sessions (see below).

We are interested in meeting and talking with fellow technologists. Contact us this week so we can setup times to meet at the event.

Keeping up with patches has never been more critical. For hardware, that’s… hard. What if servers were deployed 100% ready to run without any need for remote configuration or access? What if we were able to roll a complete rebuild of an entire application stack from the BIOS up in minutes? Those are key concepts behind a cloud and container deployment pattern called “immutable infrastructure.” It’s called immutable because the servers are deployed from container images produced by CI/CD process and destroyed after use instead of being reconfigured. It’s a container and cloud pattern that has finally made it to physical.

In this talk, we’ll cover the specific process and its advantages over traditional server configuration. Then we’ll dive deeply into open tools and processes that make it possible to drive immutable containers into your own infrastructure. The talk will include live demos and will discuss process and field challenges that attendees will likely face when they start implementation at home. We’ll also cover the significant security, time and cost benefits of this approach to make pitching the idea effective.

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet RackN (@rackngo)

According to a recent report from Forrester, executives and DevOps practitioners are on very different pages when it comes to strategy, customer experience, and progress. Consider this: more than 60 percent of executives believe their organization’s DevOps plans have been implemented and will even expand in the new year. However, more than 50 percent of DevOps pros who are in the weeds and working through their pipelines every day disagree.

A lot of tomorrow’s analytics will be done locally at the “edge,” or in a public or private cloud. Here’s what will drive where your analysis will happen.

Some say everything — all data and applications — will go to the cloud. Others, such as market research firm IDC, say that around 40 percent of data will be stored, managed, analyzed and kept right where it was produced, at the edge. So where’s the truth? Everywhere, actually. Analytics will be done locally at the edge of the data center, or in a public, private, or hybrid cloud.

Re-defining physical automation to make it highly repeatable and widely consumable while also meeting the necessarily complex and evolving heterogeneous data center environment is the challenge the RackN team is solving. To meet this challenge, we have developed a unique philosophy in how we build our technology; both open source Digital Rebar and the additional RackN packages.

Stand-alone Provisioning

Building Software from the API

Single Golang Executable

Modular Components – Composable Content

Operator Defined Workflows

Immutable Infrastructure

Distributed or Consolidated Architectures

L8ist Sh9y Podcast

In this week’s podcast, we speak with Stephen O’Donnell, Senior Analyst for Global Hive and author of What Every CIO Wants. He focuses on several interesting topics:

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, Edge Computing, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet RackN (@rackngo)

DevOps is a means to an end — not doubt it will also evolve, as even iterative methods need to move with the times (keep an eye on how analytics and machine learning can further speed up the development process and increase operational efficiency).

Year after year businesses face challenges when it comes to security, and 2017 was no different. Instead of trying to lecture the industry about the importance of application security testing, organizations tried to find new ways to bring security front and center.

“I think edge is to fog as…apple is to fruit,” Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium explained. “We look at fog computing as an end-to-end architecture from the cloud to the very thing connected. It encompasses bits and pieces from the cloud. Edge means different things to different people. Edge is of course a big part of it. When you talk about fog nodes and fog gateways, aggregating sensory devices at the edge, it is in essence an aspect of edge computing.”

RackN allows Enterprises to quickly transform their current physical data centers from basic workflows to cloud-like integrated processes. We turned decades of data center experience into data center provisioning software so simple it only takes 5 minutes to install and provides a progressive path to full autonomy. Our critical insight was to deliver automation in a layered way that allows operations teams to quickly adopt the platform into their current processes and incrementally add autonomous and self-service features.

RackN’s mission is to fix the current lack of fast, simple and standard ways to manage fundamental data center infrastructure activities. These include updating server firmware, operating systems and integrating provisioning into application life-cycles. RackN on-premises software integrates easily with existing processes while providing a clear path from home-grown scripting to common best-practices. RackN customers achieve a 10x performance improvement by automating provisioning and orchestration. Like any building activity, a solid foundation makes the entire stack more robust and secure.

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Items of the Week

RackN

Have you registered to join our RackN Beta Program? Simply click over to our Beta Program page and learn more about this opportunity to engage directly with RackN engineering and the Digital Rebar Community to automate and provision your existing infrastructure just like the public cloud providers. In fact, for users of Terraform we have our bare metal plugin available in the Beta to enhance your existing Terraform solution. It’s simple to join the Beta Program via our website.

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

Welcome to the weekly post of the RackN blog recap of all things Digital Rebar, RackN, SRE, and DevOps. If you have any ideas for this recap or would like to include content please contact us at info@rackn.com or tweet Rob (@zehicle) or RackN (@rackngo)

Next week we are releasing a new Podcast with Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy and Chief Information Officer at Apcera.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus are preparing for a series of upcoming events where they are speaking or just attending. If you are interested in meeting with them at these events please email info@rackn.com

Welcome to the first Digital Rebar online meetup! In our inaugural meetup we’ll provide an introduction to Digital Rebar Provision, name our mascot, discuss current and future features, and do a short demo of the product. The meetup is Sept 26, 2017 at 11:00am PST. Please join the community at https://www.meetup.com/digitalrebar/ and register for the event.